Does Angular 2 live up to the hype?

While I was waiting for Angular 2 I ran into Aurelia and haven't looked back. http://aurelia.io/

Aurelia stays out of the way and sticks to web standards, it has been a joy to work with.

Are you okay picking your state management paradigm, and additional tooling? Are you more functional or OO minded. Do you lean towards TypeScript/static typing? Do other people you are going to be working with have experience with either of the tools/platforms?

For me, imho React + Redux + fetch api go a really long way to get you there, combined with material ui, or react-bootstrap with react-icons you're all but set for getting started. The boilerplate can be painful at first.

I found getting Angular up and running (before their cli) was really much more painful... It's gotten better. I just don't like the indirection and the angular templating dsl. I find JSX and feature organizational structure much easier to accomplish and grow with in React. I find that Redux is a great middle ground for a unidirectional state management paradigm (combined with async functions and redux-thunk). Redux has some more cognative overhead in getting started, but once you have it, growing it is all more of the same, instead of leading to a path of spaghetti.

I don't think TFA really answers if it lives up to the hype, I think the hype has died down at this point, and a lot of people are wanting to move on.

It's not really a fair comparison.

Angular 2 is an entire platform while React is a library for building UI components.

You can also combine React with an Angular 2 app if you wanted to.

The answer here is use the right tool for the job - both are great.

I worked 2 years with Angular 1 and it was OK, but now that I'm working with React I can't imagine going back to Angular.

You should read the official tutorial on the React website [1], it take like 1 hour and you will know everything about React (the API is incredible simple). Then start your app with the official Create-React-App [2] (it installs for you a webpack/babel configuration and a fetch polyfill, so you can use out-of-the-box JSX, classes, import/export, async/await, a cross browser fetch for your AJAX calls, etc..). You don't need Redux, but probably React-Router if your app has several pages.

And that's it! The React/Babel/Webpack stack has completely changed how we develop web applications. And with Create-React-App you avoid all the boilerplate.

[1] https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

[2] https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app